Paris, Texas

With complete good fortune we at Influx towers recently found the DVD of the beautiful Wim Wenders film Paris, Texas, in the stack of discs at the back of the office.

Written by Pulitzer Prize – winning playwright Sam Shepard Paris, Texas follows a magni­ficent Harry Dean Stanton, who plays a silent drifter, as he tries to reconnect with his young son.

We’ve always remembered how moody and strangely beautiful the film is, but we didn’t remember how strongly the German director refer­ences American cars and the great highways of the south west of the states. Watching the film again after a fifteen year gap, it’s obvious that it is as much about America’s enduring need for automotive movement as anything else.

You can have great fun trying to name check the succession of battered pickups and other bits of Detroit steel that scroll past the lens: but it’s even more fun trying to work out how Stanton (whose face looks like a bag of spanners), managed to father a child from the beautiful and sexy Nastassja Kinski.

We suppose she must have loved his truck.